You should expect to hear a lot about up-and-coming comedian Aaron Karo within the next few years. Only don't be surprised if you hear it from Karo himself.Appearing before a packed house in the Levin Ballroom, the brazenly overconfident Karo headlined the opening event for Louis, Louis Week last Tuesday night with a performance only part stand-up comedy and mostly amateur motivational speaking. Brandeis was his third stop on his 2004-2005 college tour. Throughout his show, he substituted his more traditional stand-up set fit for a club or television audience for a less conventional hour of observations and anecdotes designed to inspire students about making the most of college life. His act also strived (unsuccessfully) to hide his underlying aim of boosting his own book sales and celebrity.

Karo's onstage shtick was essentially a retelling of the story of how he got into the comedy business. Karo told about his college frat boy years at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and about how the seeds of his career were planted one sleepless Sunday night during freshman year, when he jotted down observations about school that week and sent them out in an e-mail to his friends. Among his other "ruminations" in that initial e-mail, Karo compared college life-in which students live, eat, and study together-to a communist state.

Friends were amused by the e-mail, and Karo got into the habit of sending out weekly editions of his "Ruminations." Friends forwarded the e-mails to friends who forwarded it to other friends, eventually building Karo a following that extended far beyond his own school to others across the nation and even into high school classrooms in Austria, where an English teacher had selected Karo's Web site as assigned reading.

Throughout the show, Karo read excerpts from his e-mails on subjects ranging from test-taking and dorm life to partying and sharing bathrooms. He elicited chuckles from the audience when recounting his experience with dorm room posters, one of which according to Karo, will inevitably fall on every unsuspecting sleep-deprived student in the middle of the night. He also joked that "taking tests is easy" and that "figuring out the curve is the hard part."

Anecdotes like these evoked some laughter from the audience. It seemed, however, that the humor was less in his stories themselves rather than in their ability to connect to real-life experiences of Brandeis students, indicated by the occasional outburst of, "That's so true!" or, "That happened to me, too" echoing in the crowd.

Instead of applying the business skills he picked up at Wharton, Karo has focused entirely on entertainment since graduation. He has published a book, Ruminations on College Life, and has also inked a second book deal. In addition, he claims to have a television pilot in the works.

The most irritating part of Karo's act was his surprisingly excessive confidence in his comedy. Instead of the young charming college grad he might hope to play on television, he's better fit for the part of a frat boy diva in need of a little sobering up.

Karo's performance makes for a self-serving and smug act unfitting for someone so green in the business. Mildly entertaining at first, he becomes increasingly tedious to watch and listen to. Watching Karo is like watching a bad American Idol audition-mildly funny at first but in the end lackluster and annoying-only his act was less painful to my sense of hearing but sadder overall. At least some contestants get the hint from Simon.

Picking up on the subtleties of college life and now, on the life of a 20-something bachelor, Karo demonstrates potential toward creating his own brand of observational comedy that mimics the likes of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock. But it's clear he still has a long way to go if he wants to achieve the star status he clearly desires. Maybe he should try to do a little less tooting of his own horn and a little more original comedic material, and he might find himself attracting a few more honks from the Brandeis crowd.